


Angel in Disguise

by NorthwesternInsanity



Category: Alice Cooper - Fandom, Music RPF, Winger (Band)
Genre: Angst, Feeling Inadequate, Fever, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Nightmares, Separation, Sick Character, Trauma, guardian angel figures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-11-26 09:26:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18178832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorthwesternInsanity/pseuds/NorthwesternInsanity
Summary: Looking in from the outside on a night Reb Beach and Paul Taylor hit rock bottom following the breakup of Winger while under the watch of Alice Cooper. More than ever, they know that good doesn't always come in an obvious form -and sometimes in the least expected of ways.





	Angel in Disguise

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes one's guardian angel(s) in life comes in the disguise of a demon -something I've found to be true more than once over time. It's not always as visibly obvious as in this case, but across many rockstars in the industry whom Alice has looked out for, there really couldn't be a truer example.

It's four thirty in the morning in the hotel somewhere between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and Alice Cooper is still awake two hours after seeing his band off to their hotel rooms for the night.

He's too alert to sleep.

There's _that_ feeling in the air. It's the one he can't describe, but has felt before over and over again, and he knows what it means.

Something isn't right.

Something is about to happen. He doesn't know _what,_ but he knows.

Reb is sick.

Down the hall, he tosses about in his bed, trying to wrench free of the grips of a nightmare.

The higher his fever spikes, the more helpless he is against it.

Paul sits awake, watching him from the adjacent bed in the dark to make sure he doesn't hurt himself with his erratic movement. He hasn't been awake for long -only since the sound of squeaking bedsprings and soft whimpering woke him up -but he has no chance of falling asleep despite how tired he feels until he sees it stop.

But it doesn't. When Reb begins to cry out in terror, he gets up to pull him out of it, knowing that the startle of being woken up can't be any worse than what his feverish mind has trapped him to.

The cries progress to throat-tearing screams in the mere seconds it takes Paul to turn the lamp on and get to his side. He lands his hand on Reb as quickly as he can reach between the flailing limbs without getting hurt, and the resulting contact is not as gentle as he hoped for. It takes multiple strikes to get Reb conscious, and each one is physically and mentally harder for Paul to deliver.

A final, strangled yell pierces the room before quiet falls. The silence of night is only broken by raucous coughing with desperate attempts to gasp for air in between.

Alice has heard the screams. He's on his way down the hall to stand by, knowing now why he is awake. He's not needed yet, but he's sure he will be.

The coughing finally relents, leaving Reb lying limp and listless once again. Then, between hoarse panting, he breaks the quiet with a groggy voice torn to shreds between his screaming, coughing, and congestion, and Paul closes his eyes in the dark, turning his head away as if shrinking back from a slap. 

Reb's half-coherent words, which aren't even meant for Paul, may as well be a slap for him. The only reply he can give Reb -telling him that who he's speaking to isn't here -may as well be one too. For both of them.

And he's tired. Paul is _so_ tired. He should have some way to make it better, to turn it all around, lighten it up, make it funny -but there is none. Because it's _not_ funny, and it's not something he can make light of. Only time has a chance of turning it around for better, and the last time he checked, Paul doesn't have any control over how fast the world turns.

He's tired of only being able to respond with a useless _'I'm sorry.'_ That all he can do is show he understands -which is important enough for himself as well as Reb to know they're not really alone in enduring what they are -but he can't fix it. He can't do _anything_ to make it better.

And he's so. Fucking. _Tired._

The panting has turned irregular and convulsive, and it's loud enough to penetrate Paul's thoughts now. It's wheezy with the chest congestion fueling Reb's fever, along with another coughing jag that's trying to hide worse, and Paul knows what's happening has been coming for weeks.

A move to feel Reb's temperature and pull away the blanket and sheets to cool him down tells Paul how dire the situation is. He's drenched in sweat -far too much after what he already lost onstage -and too hot to the touch. Trying to pull him over on the bed to get him off the spot he's heated up is enough to get him to crack, and now Paul is faced with the reality of an inconsolable Reb in the middle of the night, pulling him back to what he left behind, speaking enough for the horrors he missed, and ripping straight through his heart.

Paul struggles. With his attempts to comfort Reb being of no avail, he's lost between trying to grab at the first aid kit they bring in their overnight bags while keeping one hand on Reb to show that he's still there and hasn't left him, and trying to decide where the line between wheezing with sobs and wheezing from choking on infection is, and whether or not Reb has crossed it.

To Paul, aside from the initial reaction, it seems that there's no sign whatsoever that Reb is aware that he's there between his high fever and state of catharsis that he has seen winding up for two solid months of sulking and silent grief.

He knows that at this point, there is no way he can handle it on his own. Just when he's ready to resort to leaving Reb alone in the room to seek help and risk everything becoming ten times worse while he's gone, there's a knock at the door. And Paul has to stand there with one hand outstretched, fingertips to Reb's arm, waiting to hear it again to know that it's real, because he's almost certain he's just hearing what he wants to hear.

Leaving for the short second it takes to open the door is every bit a curse as it is a blessing, because reaching out to backup is what sends them plummeting over the edge.

Reb is hysterical. He's laid out flat on his back, and he doesn't know what has happened aside from that he has jumped from one nightmare to another that is his current reality. He's no longer drowning and freezing to death in ice cold water thickened with fire retardant at the bottom of a stage set on fire by a flaming dart, trying to climb back on to pull Kip Winger out of the flames and suffocating smoke as the distance between them multiplies. The smoke scent is gone, the thick and muddy water around him and the lick of the heat are both gone, but he still is cold, wet, and shivering. His chest still burns and he can't get enough air -even when he's sucking in desperate gasps so fast that his lungs can't expand anymore before he forces himself to let it out by coughing or sobbing in near-silent wheezes. He's still aching all over with physical exertion, he doesn't have much more strength than what it takes to sling his palm over his mouth and clamp over it to muffle the sounds, and his vision is flashing over with pitch blackness so that he can't see anything different with his eyes open or closed to tell him where he is.

All he can sense in the dark is that nobody is there with him in reach of his other outspread hand, he's falling -truly feels that he's falling with nothing to catch himself on as his head spins, he feels the nauseous sensation of tears sliding over his temples, and he's hysterical.

The sweating has plunged his blood pressure so low that his pulse is thready, and as his heart races faster to compensate, he's slipping into shock by the time he can feel that Paul and Alice are both at his side trying to assess the severity of his condition.

His fever is reading 104 according to Paul, and Alice tucks ice bags he has brought from the machine at the end of the hall against his neck. He forces him to keep them there when he tries to squirm away and doesn't have the strength to roll over and get away from it. Because he's trembling and weak with delirium, and the little strength he has left is taken up by his gasps and wracking coughs.

Reb barely has the strength to swallow when Alice pushes the lip of a bottle to his mouth and makes him consume the cold, electrolyte-filled drink to recover his blood pressure, bring his raging fever down, and combat the dehydration that is sending his muscle spasms into overdrive. The pillows are folded under him to prop him up so that he doesn't inhale the drink, because he can barely lift his head, let alone sit up and lift his arms.

The fluid is loaded with sugar, but it's so burning cold in Reb's dry mouth and against his raw throat that he can't taste the sweet. With the waves of nausea rolling over him, all he can taste is the sour component of the yellow, citrusy liquid, and it nearly makes him gag before Alice takes it away and tells him to breathe. He tells him over and over in a low, deathly serious voice to try and slow his breathing down and control the coughing jags before he makes himself throw up, and it's serving little purpose other than to ground him, because spasms in his chest have put it far out of Reb's control for now, and Alice knows that too. The speaking and the absence of the cold liquid reminds him again that he's not still drowning below the stage.

He wishes his vision would come back into focus so he can see Paul and Alice to further prove to himself that the terror he fell out of wasn't real. He wishes he could get his throat to stop spasming and his lips to work so he can tell them he feels and hears that they're there as they now sit over him with nothing left they can do other than to be there with him, watch over, and wait.

Alice keeps both of his hands down on Reb's arm. He doesn't make any sort of soothing motions, nor does he continue to make verbal remarks. He is simply _there._

Paul holds his other hand in the faint lamplight breaking up the dark. He can feel how Reb tries to squeeze it for comfort, but his fingers are uncoordinated and shake too much for him to get a grip. Paul's other hand strokes through Reb's hair. What was once curly and fluffy is now smooth and straight -and currently plastered to Reb's neck and face with sweat and tears, then down his shoulder and against his chest where his heart flutters too weak and too fast.

Paul looks different too, in his own way. Gone is his playful, impish grin and bright spirit. He looks tired. Burnt out. Even worse than when he left Winger, and this is how he is experiencing the pain he missed then. The pain of the events that he did not physically experience, but are his own too, because leaving the band and extensive touring behind, in his mind, never equated to leaving the family he had within it behind, and he knew more than ever that the same was true with Alice when he rejoined him.

He's not aware that he has zoned out entirely and can't see anything in the room anymore, and he doesn't realize it until he hears the sobbing come to a stop, leaving behind only the hiccuping gasps that Alice calls 'snubbing', and he can hear it slowing down too.

A blink clears Paul's vision and brings him back to reality to let him see that Reb is still in the grips of his fever, but has stabilized enough for partial lucidity. The second he turns around, he finds himself with one of Alice's hands lifting from Reb to land on his shoulder, and Alice is looking him right in the eyes with that knowing _look_ that can go right through him.

He's not aware that Reb can sense the pain in his impaired state until Reb's weak hand pulls out of his grip and tries once again -successfully, this time -to grip Paul's hand from the outside, and he's not gripping it to comfort himself.

And it's not until then that he's aware that this cathartic episode includes him in his own way too, and that there's more reason to why he's with Alice now than agreeing to help him out when he needed a keyboardist in a pinch. It's not just that Alice needs him, or that it helps Reb for him to be there.

Paul needs them too now. Both of them. They all need each other.

So he squeezes Reb's hand back, and rather than forcing himself to put on a funny act that won't come naturally or give a cliche apology because it's expected, he talks with Alice and bares what he actually feels. He lets himself be tired. He lets himself miss his bandmates whom he'd once needed a break from after far too much time tied together on the road, because looking at Reb, he knows that if they ever do all see each other together again and they don't treat each other any differently, nobody will ever be quite the same, for all the wrong, heartbreaking reasons.

He misses Kip, whom neither he, nor Reb can reach for now -and even if they could, they would be even more lost as to how to help him. He misses Reb as he was before he was traumatized. And he misses Rod and just wants to hear him scold him for making trouble so that he can tease him back until they're both laughing. But even though he can call Rod, he knows it's not going to happen tonight.

And when Alice -who many a time has scolded him in the same kind of way -softly reminds him of how strong he's been through it and tells him that he's done more than he realizes he has, and that he doesn't have to be able to fix it to do good, Paul finds himself giving way to silent tears over Alice's shoulder.

Alice doesn't object to it, nor does he try to push it further. He just takes his one free hand that's not lying over Reb's wrist and crosses his arm lightly over Paul's back. He has contact with both of them, and Paul and Reb continue to grip hands so that they're all holding each other together.

It's an hour before Reb's fever fully breaks and he stops fighting to escape the cold paraphernalia placed around him -before conscious light returns to his eyes, before his breathing is as normal as it can be while he's sick, and his pain lets up. By which point the sky has changed from pitch black to a dark navy as somewhere in the distance, the sun is casting the tips of its farthest reaching rays onto the horizon.

Paul has long since moved to lay beside him. He's whispering to Reb softly, and Reb is speaking back to him as much as his sore throat will allow him between coughing jags. They're catching up on things that they haven't shared in the months they've been together. Things they haven't been able to talk about over two months of near-silence and shock. Things they might have avoided regardless because it hurts, and the same things that have only brought tonight on.

Reb looks the absolute worst Paul has ever seen him look physically in their times together, but seeing a distant light in his eyes, hearing him speak, and feeling him try to reach his arms around him is such a vast improvement that it's the first time he's caught a glimpse of Reb as he knew him and a sign that he'll be better in time, and Paul can't keep from embracing him hard even if he's now doomed to get sick because of it.

Reb tells him that too -provoking a low chuckle and agreement from Alice -but doesn't object when Paul still can't bring himself to care, hugging him and doing the perfect impression of one of Rod's playful scoldings until they're both laughing softly, because Paul forgot how well he could imitate.

And Alice -clad in black and red casual clothes and still with the faint, dark cast of corpse paint around his eyes that he could never entirely rid himself of until morning, no matter how many times he washed after a show -continues to sit over them. He has not left once, and has yet to show intention to leave.

To the typical pedestrian, even out of his full stage gear, his looks would be taken as evil. Devilish. Demon-like. Villainous. Perhaps he looks like a more realistic portrayal of the persona he embodies every night onstage.

But it's the way he's sitting just right, lined up with the lamp right behind his head -the cast of light it sends out gives the appearance of a halo floating over his pitch black hair.

Because he's really an angel in disguise.

The angel who holds them together even while they are cast apart.

The angel who has been there to catch Reb with invisible wings while he was falling, and continues to push him back up, even while he hasn't been ready to climb -all while standing by to catch Paul from falling too.

The angel who can't fix any of it more than anyone else can, but has already saved them by simply _being_ there.

And for Paul, being back under his watch is enough of a sign to know that they won't be apart forever. It doesn't matter if he can fix it or not, because one day it will be better, they'll all be back with each other, and they'll still care just as much no matter what has changed.


End file.
